Published 4:00 am, Sunday, May 4, 2003

These are fearful times for the megalithic media corporations who produce and sell movies, music, television shows, books and magazines. With each passing moment -- each advance in chip and network technologies, each increase in connection speed, each additional user signed on to the Internet --

computer networks are more capable of absorbing and distributing copyrighted materials for free. And so with each passing moment, folks are becoming a little less enthusiastic about paying.

A week ago, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against the entertainment industry and in favor of the online file-sharing services Grokster and Morpheus, which are used to swap music and movies. The ruling was based on the rather narrow grounds that the services were incapable of distinguishing between exchanges of copyrighted and noncopyrighted materials, and hence were not responsible for illegal uses of their software. But it was also a practical victory for those of us who are enthusiastic about the free exchange of information.

The music industry, in particular, is facing the prospect of an amazingly rapid disintegration because virtually everything it tries to sell is widely available for free. And as the saying goes, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. In a decades-long celebration of puerility and mediocrity, large record companies have become continuously more consolidated into fewer hands, less tolerant of diversity and more obsessed with a star system in which they themselves and a few artists reap huge rewards while most musicians struggle to be heard at all.

Indeed, the major labels are famous for doing things like signing original or idiosyncratic artists to exclusive contracts and then refusing to release their records, while engaging in production and publicity involving artists they manufacture from the ground up such as Britney Spears or the Back Street Boys. Indeed, the major-label versions of such central areas of artistic expression and subcultural formation as hip-hop, country music and punk are diluted, safe and boring.

Destroying that industry is a very, very good idea. And roughly the same might be said of the slavishly starstruck movie world with its bloated blockbusters, or of book publishing with its twin obsessions on authorial prestige and print run. All these industries operate by trying to enforce on us a hierarchy of artists and ideas of their own devising for their own benefit. But it is already easily possible to publish your book yourself and distribute it free to anyone who wants to read it without using paper at all or make your own music and send it out over the telephone wires. Surely that can't be something bad.

The only reasonable concern here is that it is going to become harder for people who want to work in the arts to make a living. It is of course worth keeping in mind that most such people are already excluded from making a living by the industry itself. But it is true that in a universe of free information, no one is going to be able to get rich making records, though certainly people will still pay to see live performances.

The sale of recorded music is only a century old, and music existed before that and was often pretty good. Your basic troubadours or balladeers or juke joint performers didn't pay for the rights to use the material that constituted their traditions. They didn't need a huge recording budget, and for that matter (as we see in the vital zones of the music industry, such as alt-country, independent punk and underground hip-hop), they still don't. But many of them did make a living.

Indeed, if you take some of the money out of this thing, you'll get in compensation an increase of diversity, creativity, courage and intelligence. The audience disintegrates from a mass united by advertising campaigns into communities of sound that coalesce around expressions they find meaningful. Smaller and more various audiences entail more various and authentic art.

In short, don't assume that it is self-evident that people can own all the reproductions of the material they generate. It isn't self-evident at all. And don't assume, as the entertainment industry contemplates with horror its own destruction, that it's not going to be a pleasure for everyone else.

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